Kespry: The Story Behind The Aerial Intelligence Company That Is Transforming Industrial Work

Menlo Park, California-based Kespry has built an aerial intelligence platform based on the use of industrial drones powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. Kespry’s aerial intelligence platform is used in cases such as construction, mining and aggregates, as well as insurance claims. What makes Kespry’s drones more durable than “off-the-shelf” rivals is that it can withstand higher-wind conditions, handle longer flight times and has much high-resolution cameras. To learn more about Kespry, I interviewed Chairman and CEO George Mathew.

Kespry CEO George MathewCaroline Shearer

Mathew has been involved in scaling technology companies at various stages of growth over the last 20 years. Mathew said that his roles were most recently leaning towards early to mid-stage startups. Prior to joining Kespry, Mathew worked in a variety of positions at Alteryx, SAP and Salesforce.com. At those companies, Mathew was involved in “driving company strategy, leading product management and development, and building sales and marketing teams.”

Mathew told me that when he joined Kespry in early 2017, he was focused on leading the company’s mission to transform the future of industrial work with market-leading drone and sensor technology. “I tend to exhaustively focus on our customers’ needs so we can deliver world-class aerial intelligence products. Our products are targeted to very specific industry use-cases that enable industrial work to be accomplished more precisely, efficiently, and most importantly, more safely than the status quo,” said Mathew in the interview.

When I asked Mathew what led to the decision to head up Kespry, he said that it was difficult at first. He was previously the President & COO of Alteryx and was in the midst of taking the company public after a five-and-a-half-year growth trajectory. “But something kept tugging at me when I consider all the incredible opportunities to change the very nature of industrial work with what Kespry was offering to miners, roofers, construction workers, industrial inspectors, etc.,” Mathew described. “In the end, I asked myself a simple question: ‘Would I be unhappy if someone else ran with the Kespry opportunity?’ The answer was an incredible moment of clarity and self-discovery and I haven’t looked back since!”

Kespry now has over 170 mining and aggregates companies that are using its aerial intelligence platform. Mathew highlighted that Kespry’s aggregates customers have flown 10,400 worksite missions measuring 223,000 stockpiles across 1.4 million acres.

“With Kespry, you use the iPad to draw out the flight plan with a few taps, and then the drone flies the mission by itself. The key benefits are that you capture consistent, high-quality imagery and improve safety by eliminating potential crashes due to human error,” Mathew detailed. “Further, our subscription model provides all of the hardware maintenance, software upgrades and even a $1 million-dollar liability insurance policy in a single bundle. It’s a fixed-price investment with no surprises. We also provide our customers with a customer success manager to provide detailed training and implementation planning, and all ongoing technical support.”

Another milestone that Mathew pointed out is when Kespry’s multi-industry cloud platform was established in July 2017. “It’s the backbone on which all of our vertical industry-focused applications, analytics, and data processing is built upon. It pairs with our industrial drone technology and provides our customers with comprehensive sensor-based processing with analytics and machine learning,” Mathew explained.

Kespry has a standard model of its drone for aggregates, mining and construction. And there is an enhanced model for those sectors with higher-grade GPS sensors for increased accuracy. “We also offer a unique inspection drone to support the needs of the insurance and roofing industries. This drone includes a very high-resolution 50mm camera with a downward lens to capture detailed rooftop imagery. Our drone platform also integrates AI and machine learning to identify damage and hail strikes on rooftops and automatically models and calculates roof dimensions,” Mathew highlighted.

Kespry's Drone TechnologyKespry

And Kespry also offers a complete earthworks toolset for measuring and running reports on existing topographic conditions, as well as cut-and-fill quantities for bidding, planning and earthworks operation management. “We provide a customized inventory management system that automatically calculates stockpile volumes and stores real-time material records across multiple sites. And our mine planning tools can now be used to comprehensively monitor and manage stripping, blasting and haul road operations,” Mathew added.

When I asked Mathew about some of Kespry’s customer success stories, he cited Oregon-based earthworks company D&T Excavation. D&T Excavation uses Kespry for inventory management and worksite topographical analysis. D&T project engineer Dan Liechty told Kespry that they can survey places and verify it without spending two or three days conducting topographical analysis with a GPS base and rover.

And Kespry helped increase safety for D&T because they previously had to send its employees out to climb to the top of very tall stockpiles. With Kespry’s autonomous industrial drone platform, D&T employees will not have to worry about losing their balance or falling off the stockpiles. The drones can handle the measurement tasks while the operator remains at the ground level. Plus it saves time because it previously took hours for employees to climb to the top of a rock stockpile and come down with roughly 15 topographical points compared to the hundreds or thousands that they get with the Kespry drone.

Kespry heard a similar story from Poe Asphalt quality manager Taj Anderson. Anderson said that the information from the Kespry Drone arrives much faster and in a safer way. Working in construction is a dangerous environment and the time savings the Kespry drone provides enables Anderson to spend more time with his family. Anderson is no longer gone for a couple weeks at a time.

“It's stories like these that inspire Kespry employees to do such great work. They know they're really contributing in a positive way to making the lives of industrial workers better,” Mathew enthusiastically exclaimed.

Kespry has raised over $60 million in funding with the most recent being the $33 million Series C round closed in December 2017. G2VP led that round and was joined by Shell Technology Ventures, Cisco Investments and ABB Ventures as new investors in the company.

What are Kespry’s future company goals? “Everything we do at Kespry is designed to make our customer experience as beneficial as possible. We’re planning to expand our Machine Learning and AI capabilities, including adding new sources of sensor-based data that can be captured and processed in our platform, and broaden the number of industries we support, including the energy and logistics sectors,” Mathew concluded. “We will continue adding deeper cloud capabilities, as well as enhancing how Kespry data can be experienced with integration into the enterprise systems our customers use every day to drive their businesses. We also want to remain one of the very best places to work—one in which every day is a new adventure, and where you’re surrounded with some of the smartest, most forward-looking people imaginable.”

I have written over 20,000 articles about startups, gadgets and large technology companies over the last ten years. My Forbes column focuses on the tech economy, startups and gadgets. When I am not writing for Forbes, I spend time hanging out with my wife around metro Detroi...